Art Zeile
Analyst · B. Riley FBR
Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to our first quarter fiscal 2019 earnings conference call. We appreciate your interest in DHI. We are pleased to report another quarter of improved financial results, highlighted by year-over-year growth in our ongoing tech-focused revenue. This is a significant milestone because it's the first time that our revenue has grown in several years. At the same time, we continue to deliver solid adjusted EBITDA margins at 23%, a sequential increase of one percentage point. We have done so, while also investing in and launching a new commercial sales team to accelerate revenue growth. As these results demonstrate, we continue to see the positive effects of the sales, marketing and other operational changes we made over the past year as part of the strategic transformation of our business. We have simultaneously strengthened our leadership team with the addition of a new Chief Product Officer, a new Chief Marketing Officer and most recently, a new Chief Technology Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. We have the right team in place to execute on our growth strategy. Now let's talk about some of the progress we made during the first quarter. As I told you, we rolled out a dedicated commercial accounts team to accelerate our efforts to attract new direct hire customers, those customers that have their own internal recruiting teams. These efforts have already resulted in many new customer wins for Dice. Prior to my joining DHI a little over a year ago, the company was focused on maintaining its existing customer base and put little emphasis on customer acquisition. I believe we need to do both in good measure to grow successfully. With the positive results we are already seeing from our commercial accounts team, we intend to incrementally add resources in 2019 to further build on our success. In the first quarter, we also devoted significant effort to refining our marketing channel strategy, which is predominantly geared towards candidate acquisition. We changed our agency relationship, both for paid search and for affiliate programs, and are seeing early signs of improved results. We believe our marketing efforts are at an inflection point, bolstered by the new Chief Marketing Officer, a change in agencies and pivoting to a performance marketing approach. Our improved financial results are a reflection of our comprehensive efforts to improve how we manage the business. However, our future growth and profitability will be driven by delivering on a product strategy to make each of our three brands more effective for clients and more engaging for candidates. As I've described in the past earnings calls, these efforts center on applying the lessons learned from our ClearanceJobs career marketplace to Dice and eFinancialCareers. I'm pleased to report we made significant progress since our last call. For our Dice platform, one of these upgrades was the launch of Candidate Match, which is now in general availability to all our clients with access to the Dice employer portal. Candidate Match uses our proprietary technology skills data model to grade each candidate's skill, experience and relevance against the requirements of a job posting. Applications are automatically scored using sophisticated algorithms, allowing recruiters to quickly rank order their candidates. Candidate Match is a big step forward in our match capability and a demonstration of our commitment to matching algorithms as a core competency and differentiator in our marketplace. Our second important Dice release was the introduction of pay-per-view pricing, which we are offering alongside our current user license model. ClearanceJobs has successfully delivered performance-based pricing for years, and we know that when we offer our clients flexible pricing options, we encourage greater usage. In ClearanceJobs, we have seen increased revenue per customer with this model, and although we are in the early stages of rolling out pay-per-view with Dice, we are seeing a similar pattern emerge. During the first quarter, we also completed the rollout of TalentSearch within IntelliSearch to over 99% of Dice customers. With IntelliSearch in place, we have seen double-digit growth in searches against our historical usage numbers. IntelliSearch also applies our proprietary technology skills data model that maps over 100,000 technology skills and their relationships, allowing clients to search our candidate database using an entire job description rather than a job title and location. It delivers a short list of the most relevant candidates that fit the exact skill set that they are looking for. We also released new important enhancements to our eFinancialCareers and ClearanceJobs platforms in the first quarter. For eFC, we released a new job search capability, which provides an improved search experience for candidates looking for jobs that fit their exact skills and career aspirations. For ClearanceJobs, we introduced a user-generated news feed for candidates called Pulse, which enables a stream of career-focused information from all the recruiters they are connected to. Pulse is part of the ClearanceJobs Next Generation platform we launched on December 28 of last year. Next Gen is a substantial leap forward in delivering a true career marketplace, where employers engage with candidates on opportunities by leveraging robust profiles, live chat, instant messaging and voice over IP communications. We are pleased to note that since this release, every important engagement metric that we track for ClearanceJobs has at least doubled. We believe this early success indicates that the career marketplace features in ClearanceJobs drive incremental usage, which we will ultimately deliver in the form of revenue growth. The key features that differentiate the ClearanceJobs user experience are now part of the product road maps for both Dice and eFinancialCareers. While we have made great strides, we still have a lot of innovation ahead of us. You will see this through meaningful product releases every quarter. In the second quarter, we are delivering our new job search capability to Dice. We are also releasing a new Chrome extension for IntelliSearch. Finally, we will be launching a new recruiter profile and messaging platform in beta for eFinancialCareers. Before I conclude, I want to highlight two new appointments we made to our Board of Directors during the quarter. Max Carnecchia brings more than 20 years of experience leading enterprise software, SaaS and analytics firms, and currently serves as the CEO and Board member of software company Mitek Systems. And David Windley has more than 30 years of human resources experience globally in a range of industries. David was the former Chief Human Resources Officer at Yahoo! and Fusion-io, and currently serves as the CEO of IQTalent Partners, a professional services firm focused on talent acquisition. David is also the Board chair for the Society of Human Resources Management or SHRM. Max and David are excellent additions to the DHI Board as they bring a wealth of industry experience and solid backgrounds as operating executives and Board members of publicly held companies. Max and David will replace John Barter, current Chairman of the Board; and Burton Goldfield, member of the Audit Committee, whose terms expire as of our annual meeting next week. At that time, Skip Schipper will become our new Chairman of the Board. Skip has deep industry experience, having served as the Head of Human Resources at Twitter, Groupon and Cisco Systems. Today, Skip is the Chief People Officer at Yext. I would like to thank both John and Burton for their many important contributions to the strategic direction of the company. I strongly believe our company is in a period of positive change because of their guidance and commitment to the success of our team. In closing, as we continue to successfully execute on our strategic growth plan, our vision remains the same: to create indispensable career platforms where technology professionals connect with the right opportunities and where clients have access to the highest-quality talent. We believe we are delivering the best platforms in the market, and we look forward to reporting on our continued progress throughout the year. With that, let me turn the call over to Luc, who will take you through our quarterly financials, and then we'll take questions you may have. Luc?
Luc Grégoire: Thank you, Art, and good afternoon, everyone. As Art mentioned, we're very pleased with our progress this quarter, especially our return to year-over-year growth in our ongoing tech-focused revenues. For those on the call that may be new to our story, since the end of 2017, we divested 4 noncore brands and closed our Dice Europe business. What's left is our 3 tech-focused brands, and as such my remarks and related comparisons on revenues will refer only to these remaining businesses. So jumping right in. For the first quarter, we reported tech-focused revenues of $37.1 million, up 2% year-over-year excluding foreign exchange, and it's the first time in several years that we've seen a year-over-year increase in revenues, reflecting the significant changes we've made over the past year. The improvement we've seen - we're seeing in our tech-focused revenue trends over the past several quarters were driven by improving trends at Dice, another quarter of record revenues in ClearanceJobs and steady eFinancialCareers revenue, excluding foreign exchange. Looking at the brands. Dice revenue was $23.1 million in the quarter, down only $100,000 or 1% year-over-year. This is much improved from Q1 2018, when Dice revenue had declined 10% year-over-year. We're happy with the improved trend we're seeing with Dice and expect the changes we have underway to continue to drive improved performance in this brand, which is important as it makes up a little over 60% of our total revenue. The trend in Dice recruitment package customers has also stabilized, following many years of decline, with the first quarter ending at over 6,100 customers with no major customer loss during the quarter, while our renewal rate on customer count edged up sequentially to 68%. Other improvements to our Dice metrics include our renewal rate on revenue, which increased 700 basis points year-over-year to 81%. Our average monthly revenue per recruitment package customer increased by 2% year-over-year to $1,134 or approximately $13,600 on an annualized basis. We feel these metrics are key as over 90% of our revenues are recurring coming from recruitment package customers with an average contract length of slightly over 12 months. ClearanceJobs' first quarter revenues were $5.8 million, a 20% increase year-over-year and the 13th consecutive quarter with at least 20% growth. This persistent revenue growth underscores ClearanceJobs' strong product innovation and competitive differentiation. For eFinancialCareers, revenue for the quarter was $8.2 million, in line with the prior year quarter, excluding the impact of foreign exchange rates. We saw growth in Asia Pacific, where we continue to see strong demand by the Tier 1 banks and growing penetration of the Tier 2 banks, which represent a substantial pool of potential clients. This growth was offset by some macro headwinds we're seeing in Europe and some competitive challenges in North America. We're currently testing pay-per-view in these markets and looking to progress further down our innovation road map to help address these challenges. Overall, we believe we've reached the turning point and are at the beginning of sustained long-term revenue growth. We expect that our tech-focused businesses will achieve modest year-over-year revenue growth in the first half of 2019 and continue to improve as the year progresses, buoyed by Dice, which is now poised to achieve year-over-year revenue growth in the second half of 2019. Turning to expenses. First year quarter operating - first quarter operating expenses were $33.5 million for a $7.3 million or 18% year-over-year reduction, of which $4.6 million related to our divestitures and $1.5 million was due to the closure of Dice Europe in 2018. The remaining reduction of $1.2 million came from the ongoing tech-focused business. In the first quarter of 2018, our ongoing tech-focused business had a few unique onetime items, including expenses of approximately $2 million for a legal contingency as well as costs related to the CEO transition, partly offset by a $1.2 million commission expense reduction upon implementing the new revenue recognition standard. None of these items recur in 2019. The remainder of the decline in operating expenses came from spending efficiencies. These efficiencies helped us fund increased sales expense as we built out and launched our commercial sales force. As Art mentioned, we're seeing good initial traction from the commercial team, and we intend to incrementally add sales as we progress through 2019. Looking forward to the rest of the year, general and administrative expenses will decline as we have mostly concluded the cost-reduction consulting engagements and are moving to an internal focus of continuous improvement. We'll continue to invest in product development, which should be mostly funded by the efficiencies we found over the last several quarters. Otherwise, first quarter operating expenses are a good proxy for upcoming quarters, and we expect to hold the current adjusted EBITDA margin for the rest of 2019. Tax expense for the first quarter of 2019 was $1.9 million, reflecting an effective tax rate of 54%, which differed from our expected rate of 25% due to discrete tax items in the quarter relating to share-based awards and transition tax driven by final tax reform regulations that were issued in February 2019. Net income for the quarter was $1.6 million or $0.03 per diluted share versus net income of $3.5 million or $0.07 per diluted share a year ago. The current quarter earnings were negatively impacted by disposition-related costs and discrete tax items totaling $1.8 million after-tax or $0.04 per diluted share. Prior year earnings benefited from a gain on sale of businesses, net of disposition-related cost and discrete tax items, for a favorable impact of $400,000 after-tax or $0.01 per diluted share. So on a normalized basis, our diluted earnings per share was $0.07 in the first quarter of 2019 compared to $0.06 for the first quarter of 2018. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $8.5 million for a margin of 23%, which was in line with the first quarter of 2018 when excluding Dice Europe results. We generated $3.8 million of operating cash flow in the first quarter, a decrease of $3.7 million year-over-year. This result was driven primarily by changes we made to the timing and frequency of our billings beginning in the first quarter of last year as well as timing in the settlement of our 2018 year-end payables. We expect operating cash flow to return to more normalized levels for the remainder of 2019. Now let me briefly address a few items on our balance sheet. First, we expect a modest rise to the current run rate of capital expenditures throughout the remainder of 2019 as we continue to invest in innovation. As the end of the quarter, our debt was $17 million, having paid down $1 million during the quarter, and our leverage ratio was about 0.5 adjusted EBITDA. Deferred revenue at the end of the quarter was $61 million as compared to $56.1 million on December 31, 2018. We see this seasonal increase as a return to a more normal pattern of working capital dynamics, and we feel the billing practice changes of last year have now mostly cycled through. With regards to our buyback program, we repurchased approximately 250,000 shares during the first quarter at an average price of $1.96 for a cumulative total of 1.3 million shares at an average price of $1.87 since starting our buyback program last May. As we announced today, our Board of Director has authorized a new $7 million buyback program running through May 2020, which we believe is appropriate even at the current valuation and can also help offset dilutive impact of stock-based compensation. In closing, we're excited by the market opportunity in front of us and confident in our ability to deliver a differentiated user experience across our tech-focused brands for employers and candidates alike. We're equally confident in our ability to grow revenues and deliver on the meaningful operating leverage that's embedded in our business as we begin to benefit from the significant changes we've made so far. And one final point on the investor relations front, Art and I will be participating in a number of investor conferences in May and June. We'll be presenting at the B. Riley FBR Annual Conference on May 23, the 9th Annual LD Micro Invitational on June 4 and 5, and at the East Coast Ideas Conference - Investor Conference in Boston on June 12. We hope to see many of you there. And as always, I'd like to thank you for your interest today. And with that, let me turn the call back to Art.